Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Cogn Sci. 2008 Oct;32(7):1177-99. doi: 10.1080/03640210802152335.
What aspects of spatial relations influence speakers' choice of locative? This article presents a study of static spatial descriptions from 24 languages. The study reveals two kinds of spatial terms evident cross-linguistically: specific spatial terms and general spatial terms (GSTs). Whereas specific spatial terms-including English prepositions-occur in a limited range of situations, with concomitant specificity in their meaning, GSTs occur in all spatial descriptions (in languages that employ them). Because of the extreme differences in range of application, the two are considered separately. A multidimensional scaling analysis is used with specific spatial terms to extract statistically valid similarities across the languages sampled. For GSTs, which have not been previously analyzed in the literature, a semantic analysis is proposed and experimentally validated. The results suggest the importance of geometry, function, and qualitative physics to the meanings of both kinds of spatial terms, although the details differ.
空间关系的哪些方面会影响说话者对处所的选择？本文研究了来自 24 种语言的静态空间描述。研究揭示了两种在跨语言中明显存在的空间术语：特定空间术语和一般空间术语（GST）。虽然特定空间术语——包括英语介词——只出现在有限的情况下，其含义也具有特定性，但 GST 出现在所有空间描述中（在使用它们的语言中）。由于应用范围的极端差异，这两者被分别考虑。多维标度分析用于特定空间术语，以从抽样语言中提取统计上有效的相似性。对于以前在文献中没有分析过的 GST，提出了一种语义分析并进行了实验验证。结果表明，几何形状、功能和定性物理对这两种空间术语的含义都很重要，尽管细节有所不同。
